The NPR Politics Podcast - Lawmakers Created A Needless Crisis. They're Close To Solving It.

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Democrats took a big gamble: they chose not to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling when they had full control of government, betting that it could create a headache for the Republican-controlled House. Republicans, after repeatedly raising the debt ceiling without issue during the Trump administration, held global financial stability hostage to secure minor policy wins.Now, after flirting with disaster for weeks, the parties appear close to ending a crisis of their own making.This episode: political correspondent Kelsey Snell, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Peter coming from the Rotunda of the United States Capitol on my last day as a Senate intern. This podcast was recorded at 2.08 p.m. on Tuesday, May 30th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be reliving the amazing memories I made here. Okay, here's the show. Oh, well, that building cannot operate without interns, so thank you for what you do. I was a Senate intern way back in the day. Really? Yeah. Oh, well, that building cannot operate without interns. So thank you for what you do. I was a Senate intern way back in the day. Really? Yeah.

And you still came back to work there. I know. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. The president and Republican Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, have drafted a deal to avoid a government default. That's after flirting for months with not letting the government make payments on the money it owes, which could topple the global economic system and send everything into chaos. So this last minute deal has a lot of compromises. And like most big negotiations, it includes some things that are already angering pockets of lawmakers in both parties. So Deirdre, just to get started, can you give us kind of the broad

outlines of what's in this deal? Right. So this is a modest deal. I mean, this is similar to other kinds of deals we've seen in divided government around negotiations over lifting the debt ceiling. This deal lifts the borrowing authority through 2024. That is past the presidential election in November 2024. That's a key marker. It also includes some spending cuts for the first year, keeps spending sort of roughly at the same level it's at now. For 2025, federal spending for just non-defense programs. The deal is focused on that slice of the federal budget, non-defense programs. They would get a 1% boost in the second year. And there are some suggestions for caps following those, but no real enforcement mechanism for that. The goal here from what Republicans is saying is they're saying that this bill will change the trajectory of federal spending. But overall, because we're in divided government, and because both the President and Republicans agreed they did not want to touch Medicare or Social Security, we're dealing with kind of a narrow

slice of federal spending overall. They also included a couple of policy provisions in this bill that are important. They included some provisions to speed up permitting of energy projects. They added some new work requirements for those in a specific age group, age 50 to 54, for people who are enrolled in some federal safety net programs like food stamps. They did wall off Medicaid, which was a program Democrats did not want to touch as part of these negotiations. And after negotiations, Republicans were not able to get any rollbacks to President Biden's signature legislative bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, which they had been trying to roll back. And they also clawed back about $30 billion in unspent COVID money. But Deirdre, are they on track to get this done? It's going to be tight. I mean, Congress cannot really act very quickly.

The House is slated to vote tomorrow evening. That was to give House members 72 hours between when the bill was released and when they actually vote on it tomorrow evening. There right now is a real revolt on the right of the House Republican Conference from conservatives who really don't like the deal. We always knew that there were going to be members on the right flank and on the left of the Democratic caucus who were going to be unhappy about any compromise and were likely to vote no. The math that we're trying to figure out right now and the speaker is trying to figure out and the president is how do they get sort of the bulk of the House Republicans and the bulk of the House Democrats to join together and have some kind of bipartisan majority. Leaders on both sides are confident they will do it. And they have said that again today. But once the House passes this bill, if the House passes this bill tomorrow night, it heads to the Senate. The Senate has a hard time acting quickly.

We expect them to try to vote as early as Friday or start the process and beat the clock and pass it again to the president's desk before that Monday X upset people on the right. So, you know, we also know Republicans in the House generally insist that any bill comes to the floor with a support of the majority of their party. So what is the kind of risk here for McCarthy in this moment? The risk for McCarthy is that if he can't get a majority of the majority, that's generally a indication of how weak a speaker he is. In other words, if you have to pass a bill relying on the Democrats, that means you just don't have enough juice with your own party. So McCarthy doesn't just have to put this on the floor and get it passed. He has to put it on the floor and get it passed with a majority of Republican votes. Now, there will have to be

some Democratic votes too, but he has a very, very slim majority. And what's so interesting to me is that he went on one Sunday show and said very confidently that there was nothing in here for Democrats, that he'd heard from the Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, that there was nothing in here for Democrats. And then the next Sunday show or next press conference he held said, oh, there's something in here for everyone. Well, he can't really decide. This deal, as Deird held said, oh, there's something in here for everyone. Ah, selling away. Yeah, he can't really decide. This deal, as Deirdre said, very similar to past debt ceiling deals. There is nothing very revolutionary in here.

It's really small potatoes. I think on substance, I can see why conservatives are angry, because they wanted to give Joe Biden's policies a big haircut, and they failed. Now they have to sell it as a great victory, if he's going to get enough Republicans to vote for it. This feels like just a familiar problem for Republican speakers. John Boehner lost his speakership over a revolt on the right. Paul Ryan constantly saw his legislative plan scuttled by objections from some of those same members. Are there different things at play right now? I guess both of you could answer that one. Kevin McCarthy did something that Boehner and

Ryan didn't do, which is he really pledged his fealty to the conservative members. I don't know if Deirdre agrees with me, but he gave them a lot of concessions. He put them on the rules committee. He agreed with them on a lot of things, and he's more their guy now than Boehner or Ryan ever were. Is that fair, Deirdre? I think it's totally fair. I mean, I think the other thing that McCarthy did that Boehner and Ryan didn't do is, in addition to giving them a lot of what they wanted in terms of plum assignments on committees, like rules and appropriations and oversight, where a lot of them want to be on television showing that they are holding the Biden administration accountable. He's developed personal relationships with a lot of his detractors. I mean, a lot of the same group

that threatened Boehner, like Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, had a very contentious relationship with the speaker at the time. McCarthy and Jordan get along well, and he gave him a chairmanship of a judiciary committee, and they coordinate a lot. I think that there is a lot of personality in the calculation with a lot of members. A lot of conservatives, even if they don't agree with McCarthy or feel like he's truly a conservative, like him as a person. All right. It's time for a quick break. More in a second. And we're back. And I want to take a moment to emphasize again just how much of a manufactured crisis this is. Republican lawmakers were using the risk of global financial disaster to extract

what are essentially policy concessions. And, you know, Mara, the party seems to have grown increasingly comfortable with flirting with economic disaster in fights with Democrats, despite the fact that Republicans themselves oversaw kind of a huge boom in national debt when former President Trump was in office. Can you talk a little bit about what's going on here? What's going on here is that the debt ceiling has nothing to do with the debt. It's the ultimate in Washington hypocrisy because the debt and the debt ceiling and the deficit didn't matter to Republicans when there was a Republican in the White House. Now the shoe is on the other foot and they decide to, you know, go down to the wire. What's interesting about these fights are theoretically the side that is willing to default is the side that is more powerful.

Well, neither side was willing to go all the way and risk default. Biden by absolutely not negotiating, McCarthy by pushing for a default. Welcome to divided government. Both sides seem to think there was a risk for them if they went all the way. They wanted, as you said, the Republicans wanted to extract really big policy concessions from Biden, and they weren't able to. And what's interesting to me is how this plays, if it plays at all, outside of Washington. I don't think voters care about this. I think they understand that if there was a default and they weren't getting their Social Security checks, they sure would care about it then with the debt limit when they had full control of Washington up until the end of last year.

But they chose not to, in part because they thought this fight would make Republicans look bad. But do you think anybody, you know, is watching that aspect of this? Any voters? Are there consequences for Democrats on that front? Democrats around this building at the Capitol are feeling like some regret over that issue, that they didn't opt to deal with the debt ceiling in December when they were considering that big spending bill. Several Democrats I talked to in the last week said, you know, I was pushing for that. I thought our leaders should do that. They decided not to. I mean, at that time, that bill was really being negotiated between the Senate majority

leader, the House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi, and the president. And McCarthy was kind of staying out of it for his own politics because he was trying to win back the House. So they could have added that in and sort of gotten rid of this issue, which has turned into such a, you know, firestorm here. And, you know, I guess the other big question that members of Congress haven't really been forced to answer questions about this because the financial markets haven't really reacted all that much to this whole back and forth about the debt ceiling. Because they didn't think default was real. Right. They thought that it would end the way it always ends, and it actually might end that way.

Mara, has Biden learned anything from this experience? He certainly learned something from the last debt ceiling experience, which was to not negotiate. But in the end, he had to negotiate because we're in divided government. But my question to Deirdre is, did the Democrats learn anything? They could have eliminated the debt ceiling when they had total control of Washington. They didn't. Now, is that because they felt it would be filibustered in the Senate and they couldn't overcome this filibuster?

Or they ran out of time? I mean, it seems like a pretty big omission on their part that they let the debt ceiling survive past 2022. I mean, it sort of depends on who you talk to, Mara. I mean, Democrats here, some have suggested that more centrist or moderate members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, like Joe Manchin and independent Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, expressed some opposition to dealing with the debt limit. I'm not sure that's entirely true. So they didn't have the votes, maybe.

That's what some of them are saying, that they wanted to add it to the big spending deal in December, but were worried it would slow that big package down. And that was the last train leaving the station before Republicans were taking control. So they wanted to get all the other parts through. And others suggested that maybe they figured, you know, Republicans were taking over and it was their turn to show that they can govern and deal with this issue. And, you know, now we're seeing sort of the big internal Republican fight over this issue. All right. So we will be watching this bill. First, it's off to the Rules Committee, and then I guess we'll see what happens. But that's it for today. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover

politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.